Over the past week or so, various developers have been racing to put out their first (or one of many) Notification Center widget(s). Naturally, since the Notification Center is new territory and seemingly an easy place to start off, there's been a huge jump in widgets released for the Notification Center. Some are paid, some are free, but nonetheless, I'm sure its been filling our "Changes" log in Cydia to an exuberant extent. Instead of doing one article per, since many of them are rather simple, I will be doing what I call an "Widget Round-up" to discuss the six new Notification widget that just popped up in Cydia. Without further to do, let's get started:

Note: To enable any Notification Center widgets/add-ons, simply go to Settings -> Notifications -> (X). Notification Center widgets are available on devices that are jailbroken and on iOS 5 (5.x) only (with the exception of native widgets that come with iOS 5).

Also: Whether you call them WeeApps, add-ons, or widgets, they are all the same thing. It's your personal preference in terms of what they are called.

NotiCall:

With NotiCall, you can have your Favorite Contacts from your Phone.app right in the Notification Center. Upon enabling the widget inside Notifications, you can view and access the buttons inside the Notification Center. It works with contact photos as well as without.

To be completely honest, I didn't find any pros to this widget. Here are my cons:

Cons:

When you have no contact photo, all it shows is the person's name and not the number. This is kind of difficult, especially for someone like me who has three phone numbers for his dad in his Favorites. There's no way of distinguishing them

If you do have a contact photo for a contact in your Favorites, no name or info is displayed on the button at all. All that is shown is a photo. That makes things super difficult to remember what icons goes to what number as well as the fact that it is a small button with a small image

You have to respring every time you change something about a favorite (such as add a new one, delete one, give one a contact photo, etc.) in order for it to take effect inside the Notification Center

There are other applications, such Favorite Contacts and WeeSpeeddial for Notification Center, that charge little money but add a ton of functionality beyond just what Noticall has to offer

Ultimately the decision to use a widget is your choice, however I don't find it useful whatsoever. You must have an iPhone on iOS 5 to use this widget.

Name: NotiCallAuthor: dcampogianiVersion: 1.0.0Price: Free

SlideCenter for Notification Center

SlideCenter offers a miniature slideshows of photos inside your Notification Center. SlideCenter pulls photos to use for the slideshow from the following places:

/var/mobile/Media/PhotoData/Sync/ (Photos synced from your computer)

/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100Apple/ (Camera Roll on device)

SlideCenter simply cycles through all the photos you have in those particular areas inside the Notification Center tab. If you have it open long enough, you can watch it go through all your photos.

Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

SlideCenter offers something unique, something that hasn't been done before in the Notification Center. If you are a photo lover, this might be a cool feature

It pulls pictures from both your Camera Roll and the photos you sync from your device

Cons:

Due to how small the Notification Center is, the slideshow only shows part of your picture. Depending on the layout of your picture, SlideCenter completely cuts off an important part of a photo

SlideCenter cycles photos on its own and you can't swipe through pictures manually

You can't define the amount of seconds that each picture takes before switching. Initially, it lacks a lot of options

If you find this tweak of interest to you, go download from Cydia now. It is available on all iOS 5 devices.

With ScreenLock, you can lock screen rotation on your device right from the Notification Center. All you do is simply tap the icon on the box to lock or unlock rotation. If its locked, you can't change orientation (i.e. if you lock in portrait, you can't rotate, or vice versa).

Similar to NotiCall, I did not find this widget useful. Here are my cons:

Cons:

Because ScreenLock only offers one simple feature, it doesn't seem worth it to download. You can just as easily access rotation lock by activating your App Switcher and toggling it from there

Widgets take up a lot of space, so its a good idea to keep your Notification Center tidy. This button only takes up maybe 25% of the space its allocated. My feeling is, "why take up so much space for such a tiny button?"

This widget could potentially be useful in the future, but it needs to add some new features or functionalities to make it worthwhile

Although my feeling on this widget is my opinion, it is ultimately your choice to download.

Respring for Notification Center offers a quick button to respring your device. For jailbroken devices, having the ability to respring can come in handy quite often. When you have it enabled, you simply tap the respring area to respring your device. Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

If you're a minimalist and you don't like all the crazy features applications like SBSettings, SpringPrefs, and PowerCenter have to offer, this might be a viable option

Cons:

Since this widget only has the respring capability, it takes up a lot of space for one thing

Applications such as SBSettings, SpringPrefs, and PowerCenter offer a lot more and utilizie all the space they are allocated. There's really no difference in terms of file space taken and its always nice to have more options when certain situations arise

You can download this widget right now off of Cydia. It's available on all iOS 5 devices.

If you're one to write down notes often to refer to, QuickNote gives you an option to do so directly from the Notification Center. Simply tap inside the allocated note space and start typing. When you're done, simply hit "Done."

Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

From a simplicity standpoint, QuickNote offers a simple way of writing down something to "note" or remember

Cons:

The "Done" button seems to be extremely unresponsive. When testing this, it took longer for me to actually get out of the composition view than it was running through any of the other components of the widget. It tapped numerous times on the "Done" and after a while, it finally closed. There were times that I even closed the Notification Center in order to get out of it

With the Notes.app as well as the new Reminders.app, it would be just as easy to add whatever you need there. Since QuickNote doesn't offer any other options than typing, it would just be better to use the stock applications instead

It would be nice for QuickNote to have a method of quickly deleting a note. The only way to remove what you've typed is to delete manually

It would nice to have a way to swipe between notes. That way, you could have multiple things written down and you can cycle through them. Right now, you're only able to type inside that one window. Thus, you would have to jam all that you want inside just that one window

Download from Cydia now if you wish to give it a shot. It's available for all iOS 5 devices.

Display your local IP address from your device inside the Notification Center. If enabled, a little box inside the Notification Center will show you your local IP address. This can come in handy if you're needing to know your IP address for purposes of SSHing into your device.

Here are my pros and cons:

Pros:

It's simple and displays just the IP. Some people don't really care to know other values for their device, so this is a viable option

Cons:

Again, it doesn't offer anything else other than just your local IP. Applications like SBSettings, SpringPrefs, and PowerCenter offer that and much more

It's available on all iOS 5 devices. Download it if you find it useful.

Having the ability to kill all background applications from the Notification Center has been a feature people have been asking for. That was one complaint about widgets such as WidgetTask. Now, you're able to utilize a widget that fixes that potential issue

With WeeKillBackground installed, simply open the Notification Center and tap the bar to kill all the background applications.

Since WeeKillBackground only has one feature and purpose, I had one pro.

Pros:

Applications such as WidgetTask don't have a kill all background application feature. WeeKillBackground now offers that. It will be a good companion to applications that mirror the iOS dock in the Notification Center

Unfortunately, I've noticed that IF you have a notification theme applied through Winterboard (black, aluminum, etc.. These themes change the BG of the notification bar from the stock apple folder, multitasking, notification skin to black, aluminum, chrome, etc...) that the widgets will not work and will put your phone into a safe mode loop until you uninstall it through cydia.

If anybody knows how to fix this issue please post and PM to let me know because I would really like to use some of these widgets but really dislike the stock apple BG's.

As far as I know
A lot of NC tweaks require u to hold a button for it to work.
Maybe that's the bug with quick note
Most of these are old, keep that in mind...this was just the start of of stuff for NC so they're still learning how to get stuff working in there

As far as I know
A lot of NC tweaks require u to hold a button for it to work.
Maybe that's the bug with quick note
Most of these are old, keep that in mind...this was just the start of of stuff for NC so they're still learning how to get stuff working in there

You are correct. That's because apple screwed up with touch events in the NC. Qwertyoruiop wrote a little button hack for it to work as normal if you add it to the code.

As far as I know
A lot of NC tweaks require u to hold a button for it to work.
Maybe that's the bug with quick note
Most of these are old, keep that in mind...this was just the start of of stuff for NC so they're still learning how to get stuff working in there

I tried it all. Not responsive nonetheless (at least not for QuickNote).

Weekillbackground puts me in safemode too...
Color keyboard works though..it has been updated for iOS 5.

And you need to doubletap the homebutton for the camera icon to show up on the lockscreen.

I can't get to work for some reason (color keyboard). I have enabled and everything. Wait, I'm trying get the VIP color keyboard for the theme. I didn't try the other keyboards it comes with so I wonder if it's just the theme I'm choosing. I'll check the stock keyboard for CK and then check the VIP themed one and make any changes to the file names as needed, which is how I'm getting all these themes to work anyways. I'm basically just adding @2x~iphone.png to the file names which then makes it compatible (not for all files. There are some other things that need to be done as well. For ex: to get the music and video icons changed you have to go into their stock folders and replace with the icons you want but make sure you backup the stock icons). Even the widgets for the themes are not difficult to get working if you know what u r doing.

I don't get it. It is working fine on my 3gs old bootrom... All the widget does is sending SIGKILL to all processes. What could cause the crash is that the widget is running mobile, but it is root, so I have no idea...